What Family Doesn't Have Its Ups And Downs?

All right, I take back what I said about high school productions of Fiddler on the Roof; the kids are still way, way too young to be believable in any roles above Hodel, but in this production they had great enthusiasm and decent singing skills and a good pit orchestra and superb lighting design and energetic choreography and it was more than enough to make it highly enjoyable. My cousin had one of the finer singing voices in the cast, and probably the most thankless role (Motel is so dull compared to Perchik and Fyedka, let alone Tevye, and in this production Lazar Wolf was not an old man but tall and good-looking). He appeared to be having a great time, though, and I got to see my great-aunt and uncle and various other relatives.

Afterwards we went out for Thai food. My mother loathes ginger, cilantro, garlic, curry, peppers...pretty much everything that gives food interesting flavor, so eating anything ethnic with my parents is always bizarre. This time she settled for pineapple chicken while the rest of us had satay, panang curry, spicy beef and a spicy noodle dish that she wouldn't eat. My older son pretended to have a meltdown because he wanted pork fried rice, when it turned out the real cause of unhappiness was that he hadn't gotten to play GameCube with his friend Omar all weekend. He has spent the last half hour playing while on the phone. This seems quite amusing to me.

There's nothing really wrong with Showtime's The Lion In Winter, and I quite enjoy seeing Glenn Close and Patrick Stewart play these roles, but I don't think they've contributed anything that wasn't in the Hepburn-O'Toole film. Even the more explicit gayness of Philip/Richard didn't do a thing for me. Jon Rhys-Meyers is no Timothy Dalton, in this case, and nobody could replace Nigel Terry, either.

It was over 90 degrees today with very high humidity. I really hope it's cooler tomorrow, though this is precisely how I recall cicada weather from 1987.